The universe is collapsing. The love child of infinity and time has become the bastard of another failed marriage, unbalanced and withered, troubled and empty.
At eighteen I decided to try to ease the weight of this kind of paraplegic, apocalyptic cowboy wisdom and hit the streets in search of redemption. There were rumors of a whispered oasis in the fermented vine that gave me hope, tales told by toothless creatures of a shining people not yet separated from their sisters of hope and divine substance. So I headed up the A303 hoping to drench my ‘John Majoresc’ universe in the kaleidoscopic colors of Brighton rock. Unwashed hair and linen shirt blew romantically in the salt-soaked wind as I approached the elegant and expensive Sussex countryside. My mind was drawn to infinity by the wild horses of providence. The thud of their hooves hitting the asphalt sent serotonin pounding through my nervous system, fueled only by the wisdom of Marks (Howard, not Karl) blabbering on Radio 2. He turned the fire truck in the buy and sell section into the window and parked it in the middle of the city. Wheels and home, all in one. Every man named Sam should have one.
It didn’t take long for me to settle in and meet some interesting characters. Bill ‘Bongo’ Burns; talented protégé artist whose work depicted suffering and hunger, living off aristocratic parents while trying to ‘make it big’, Little Jane; a four foot tall anti-capitalist singer-songwriter who was in the process of amassing enormous financial wealth by selling hallucinogenic drugs to manic depressives, and more of the same contradictory perversions of the human form. “No opponents, no progress,” Blake said, so maybe, I thought, this is a sign of a truly alive community. Hope and drugs. I immersed myself in the social scene, I became a being of value, a face that everyone knew and liked, I began to feel fulfilled. There were poetry readings every afternoon in dusty underground bars, and by nightfall the Cowely Club was filled with whores and anarchist virgins, vegan conspirators talking softly, drunken lovers shouting obscenities at each other in public. The whole place seems to be swept and swayed by the tide of the majestic ocean, the atmosphere was both captivating and intoxicating to my hungry and depraved mind.
The town itself was charming and magical. The Lanes sweated with life on the noble cobbled sidewalks as coffee shops, organic delicatessens and colorful patrons lined the sidewalks. You felt someone but no one among the monsters and flowers of the cut and fold freedom fighters. The sound of acoustic guitars stitched to float through the oak trees in the national park, mingling with the sweet smell of jazz cigarettes before tantalizing your senses. Sun washed brown healthy spines. I was Ernest Hemmingway every time I wrote nonsense in my tattered notebook, looking up only to catch glimpses of peacocks flaunting their trendy feathers, Miss Sixty jeans, and pastel headbands. “Brighton,” I remember noting, “is the rampant rabbit of tenements. The atmosphere here is so intense that life feels like one constant devastating orgasm, its juice thick and sweet as honey.” Typical feel-good-in-the-moment-while-high-in-the-moment nonsense. This was how I always dreamed San Francisco would be in the sixties, rich and velvety with new age culture, but sharp as a wire whip ready to cut through the ugly, sleeping world in the fundamental forms of beauty and progression. .
I felt I had reached Nirvana, but this would soon prove to be a fool’s paradise. There is a crack in all of this, they say, it is where the light enters, the poets murmur. Well, as regards the first, I can confirm. However, when the rift formed, instead of light, molasses poured out from the splitting illusion, drenching my soul once more in sticky darkness. The contradictions I had dressed in sheep’s clothing ached and throbbed like a bruised finger until the truth bit my sinew with its sharp wolf teeth. There was no romance on this rock; it was just a colorful version of the dissolute runner I left behind. The difference between my archaic and neo-hell was a purely cosmetic matter. An ugly woman redeems some non-existent sense of beauty in her by resigning herself to the fact that she is ugly. On the other hand, an advanced state of disgust is spewed out on mankind as the beast covers itself in three inches of scaly paste trying to hide its misshapen bone structure. Unless, of course, you’re a walking boner intoxicated on cheap liquor. And that, in hindsight and a tired metaphor, is exactly what I was, clad in linen and deliriously drowning in my own dopamine.
Brighton was beginning to reveal itself as a brothel for delusional dreamers, a dirty syringe filled with numbing conceit. My subconscious was working over time to erase the dark truth from my waking life. At first, when you get there and unpack, you feel like you’ve struck gold, a soul rich as a Christmas cake with Peruvian icing. So the nightmares creep in.
Velvet-wrapped skeletons and joules dance around bright fires rich with useless thoughts, swaying with sweet empty songs, embracing cracked porcelain doves. Hazy visions of rusting vintage cars in miles and miles of endless traffic, dead babies rotting in gray booster seats. Trying to escape, finding another fucking fence….
I knew the wall would come down at some point and reality would dawn, the future smacked of bipolar disorder.
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The diamond bullet entered my fragile skull one night without warning. No one noticed the little pinprick as it entered my forehead with a silent hiss. I stood tall, becoming more and more aware of the pretentious nonsense that poured out of my mouth in the crowded room. The damp wall behind me witnessed the cold of my precious neurological palace of sand pouring out of the exit wound like drunken diarrhea. I not only felt the dissolution that I had once felt, but also a completely new and darker sensation. I realized that it wasn’t just the world that was screwed up and ignorant, but also my judgment. The clown of cynicism was being teased and mocked by the very guy he felt was over the top and smarter. I had been deceived, there is nothing more depraved for a man’s soul than that. A cosmological kick in the balls. I wasted no time, as my grandiose illusions of freedom and substance collapsed around me like the twin towers of prosperity and liberty, I ran like a blazing fast dog until I could run no more.
That moment still haunts me today. I felt in a macro moment the loss of that dangling carrot that gave me the will to stumble every day, allowed me to fantasize about a world that still housed a beating heart.
Adam ruined everything. The soul of the world has been released to start a new life and will not pay maintenance. God is dead, reborn in another cosmos or in no cosmos. He could travel the world looking for that divine magic in every nook and cranny, field and city. He may have learned the lessons from him; don’t play with time, don’t masturbate, and don’t get so obsessed that you try to catch your reflection in every shiny surface that appears. Invest but don’t risk it, listen to Alan Sugar. This is the Big Crunch, the celestial master’s Death Room for which the cheated and disillusioned have sacrificed their sensual pleasure, hoping to redeem the eternal reward. A ghost town full of decaying weeds. Elvis has left the building.